I was waiting for one of those WIRED $5/year sales to come around to read their provocative article from earlier this year: “The Kremlin has Entered the Chat” (paywall).

The nut of it is that about a year ago, a dissident and vice-chair of a political party heard banging on her apartment door.  She mentioned this in a private group chat on Telegram.  “They’re unlikely to bust it down,” she wrote.  But later the FSB did break it down and when she arrived at the police station, she was shocked to hear the officer read off her messages, including “they’re unlikely to bust it down”.

As the activist later analyzed, there are two possible explanations.  The first is that she or one of her followers had their phone hacked, and the second is that that Telegram is complying with Moscow’s legal requests.

The article goes on to state:

Over the past year, numerous dissidents across Russia have found their Telegram acounts seemingly monitored or compromised. Hundreds have had their Telegram activity wielded against them in criminal cases. Perhaps most disturbingly, some activists have found their “secret chats”—Telegram’s purportedly ironclad, end-to-end encrypted feature—behaving strangely, in ways that suggest an unwelcome third party might be eavesdropping. These cases have set off a swirl of conspiracy theories, paranoia, and speculation among dissidents, whose trust in Telegram has plummeted. In many cases, it’s impossible to tell what’s really happening to people’s accounts—whether spyware or Kremlin informants have been used to break in, through no particular fault of the company; whether Telegram really is cooperating with Moscow; or whether it’s such an inherently unsafe platform that the latter is merely what appears to be going on.

The channels for safe, end-to-end-encrypted, anonymous communication are rather limited these days.  For texting and email of course, and also proprietary messaging like Facebook Messenger.  WhatsApp’s trust plunged when they were busted for sharing data with Facebook, so we’re down to Telegram and Signal.  Unlike Signal, Telegram does not set chants to E2E encryption by default.

Telegram was blocked in Russia for some time until a surprise reversal in 2020.  Telegram had previously agreed to turn over phone numbers and IP addresses, but said it had no way to hand over encryption keys, which are generated and stored on user’s phones.  The 2020 freeing of Telegram was due to Telegram “stated readiness to counter terrorism and extremism”.

You can read that two ways:

1. Under pressure from its citizens, Russia decided phone numbers and IP addresses were enough to “counter terrorism”
2. The FSB has some leverage on Telegram

To bolster the latter, consider Telegram’s finances.  There’s a lot of server and network costs, and Telegram tried an ICO but it went down in flames in 2020.  Not long after, relations with the Kremlin thawed.  Hmm.

The activist mentioned above has since moved to Signal.

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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